GW2 – All or Nothing Completed
913 words.
I’m pretty weary of writing about Guild Wars 2 so this is going to be a short post. Mostly it’s just to note that I did finish the new Episode 5, All or Nothing last night. I don’t say what happens here, but there is one big hint below (from ArenaNet) which is plenty to work out what happens, so beware.
I hadn’t logged into Guild Wars 2 a single time since I finished episode 4. I started this one on January 9th. Sometimes I didn’t play more than 10 or 15 minutes at a time.
Being enamored with RimWorld and Dwarf Fortress, I didn’t really feel like playing Guild Wars 2, as you might guess from the fact that it took me 11 days to finish precisely 2 hours and 50 minutes of content, but I felt I *had* to play it, because if you don’t play new content *immediately,* someone will spoil it for you, even if they don’t mean to. I don’t know why anyone bothers to post day-one reviews of content or even previews anymore because who is going to be foolish enough to read them? It’s a pretty awful feeling to feel forced to play a game, and doesn’t really lend itself to enjoying the experience.
Obviously I didn’t play it fast enough, so spoilers were everywhere, even when people didn’t exactly say what happened, but hey guess what? We’re all smart enough to figure out what you mean when you drop hints. That’s what “spoiler” means you know. People seem to think a “spoiler” is detailing exactly what happens. But a spoiler is actually any kind of hint. People seem to get some sort of self-satisfied pleasure out of trying to think of a way to give a hint that indicates *they* know what happened, without actually *saying* what happened, thinking they’re being clever and keeping the details hidden while simultaneously revealing all the details. But most people are smarter than that. When you combine a bunch of off-handed remarks and hints together, you can work out the details pretty easily. Stories usually don’t have very many different possible outcomes. ArenaNet themselves in fact tweeted out a massive hint on their feed that made it about 98% likely to guess the end.
Anyway I pretty much knew how it would end, so it was a chore and kind of a bore to play through the episode. The ending had no impact on me whatsoever. It was kind of huge letdown actually. ("*That* was what everyone was talking about?? I forced-marched myself through this content for 11 days for *that*?") I actually thought the previous episode had a lot more emotional impact than this one.
Beyond the final five minutes, which admittedly was new and interesting within the context of GW2, or *would* have been, if you played on day one I guess, the rest of the episode was more of the same. I kind of slept-walked through most of this one. Most of the dialog was like listening to Star Trek techno-babble. Just went in one ear and out the other. “We’ll deal with it by using the [static] [bzzt] [white noise] [insert techno babble here] and then we’ll win!”
I only have one plot comment: I thought killing Elder Dragons was a big no-no now in Guild Wars 2. I thought basically everything that had gone wrong in Guild Wars 2 in the last two expansions was directly linked to our hero killing off Zhaitan and Mordremoth. But in this episode they were super gung-ho for killing off this big purple dragon without a second thought. That was the biggest plot hole that jumped out at me. I imagine there’s some explanation for it somewhere in the minutia of the lore. Possibly during those technobabble dialog sections I tuned out. It doesn’t really matter at this point.
I even zoned out completely during most of the fighting. Just mashed keys and ran around and eventually I won, only downed a couple of times and I think I only had to restart once during the big fight at the end, mainly because the game didn’t tell me where to go next so I had to run around aimlessly for a while. (I took all the optional buffs and whatnot too.)
Oh, one other thing I chuckled about: All the Celtic knotwork on the architecture.
It looked quite a lot like someone has the same little book on knotwork that I have. Of course it’s buried in a box in a closet right now so I can’t find it to take a picture of it. But trust me, those knots look like they were copied from a book. Here’s one I doodled from the book for Inktober a while back.
How do Tyrians know the Celts anyway? Is that significant? Or something we’re supposed to overlook?
So the lesson here is: Make sure you force yourself to play and finish the new content on day one if there is any story to be seen. And people wonder why MMO players “rush” through new content. We have no choice, if we want to see the story as it’s intended. The studio itself will spoil the story in a week. Square Enix does it with Final Fantasy XIV, too.
Archived Comments
Bhagpuss 2019-01-21T17:48:22Z
Here’s the problem: I posted the day after the Episode launched saying that I wasn’t going to post in detail about it because of the reasons you outline. Of the people who read my blog who also play GW2, the only ones to respond were those who wished I had posted a detailed review, spoliers included. Personally, I prefer to play through content without knowing what it’s about but lots of people either don’t care one way or the other or would actively prefer to know in advance what to expect.
I think it’s actually very easy to avoid spoilers and still play the content at a time of your choosing, if that’s your goal. You simply don’t actively visit any portals related to the content in question - be that blogs, forums, official websites or whatever. It’s not like GW2 is going to be discussed on broadcast tv or you’re going to switch on the radio and hear about it. The only place I can think of where you might get an unexpected spolier that you’d see before you could avoid it might be Twitter but since I don’t use it I’m not even really sure about that.
I have now posted in great detail about the episode, partly because, as I said, the only feedback I got was “I wish you would write about it” and partly because I wanted to write about it. I did find the ending emotionally affecting, surprisingly so, to the point that I both dreamed about it and woke up next morning still thinking about it. That almost never happens so I felt it was worth both recording and discussing. I used a page break and a spoiler alert for the post so I’m pretty sure no-one who didn’t choose to do so will have seen it.
As it happens, I did see one stray comment somewhere online before I played the episode ( I forget where) which made me believe that Taimi was going to die at the end. Consequently I spent the whole thing waiting for that and then something entirely different happened, which probably increased the impact. In some ways I might have preferred to have known what was going to happen - I don’t play video games to get emotionally rattled. In fact, it’s something I play them to avoid.
I’m not really sure why you feel the need to play GW2’s new content while it’s new anyway. You don’t claim to enjoy or even like the game and you’re self-evidently uninvolved and disinterested in the storyline. Why does it matter a) if you already know the plot or b) ever get around to playing it at all? It’s nt as though you’ve paid for it or are paying a sub. If you really don’t want to miss out on a free thing you could just log in for ten seconds to register ownership of the Episode then log out and then you’d have it available to play if and when you ever actually felt in the mood, by which time chances are you’d have forgotten any spoilers you’d ever heard and no-one wlse would be talking about it to give you new ones!
UltrViolet 2019-01-21T19:14:45Z Wellll I wasn’t really talking about blogs or articles. You are right it is easy to avoid blog posts about new content, unless someone puts something in the picture or first sentence. I’m talking mainly about social media and podcasts (where certain hosts just blurt out huge spoilers when they don’t think they are). And ArenaNet themselves. As for why I still play it, I don’t really know. I watched The X-Files seasons 5 through 9 too. It’s just habit really. Finding out what happens to the NPCs is the only thing about GW2 that I find interesting enough to log in for. Also when the collective Internet yells “wow this episode was great!” it’s a big incentive, just to see what everyone’s talking about. It’s also one of the only MMOs that doesn’t require any special gear or passing any gates to play the new story content. You just log in and go. Plus it’s free. :)
Jeromai 2019-01-22T02:19:52Z
If it made you log back in and complete it, regardless of enjoyment level, you have successfully contributed to their metric of “returning player” logging in to play and complete the story. ;)
Whether they’re measuring the right things or whether they can extrapolate from that if they should continue with those things is a debate for another time.
I’m subjectively pretty distant from much of GW2 at the moment (and most of gaming to be honest) but I know it’s a personal affliction. Objectively, the response from Reddit and forums and so on was pretty positive on the whole.
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